Thursday, 2 October 2014

Why Healthcare Professionals Should Take Prevention Of Medical Errors Course

By Deanne Shepard


In cases of illnesses or emergencies, patients look up to their healthcare providers for assistance. They are all dedicated to offering health solutions to those in poor health. However, some patients get well, others fail to get well. In spite of the fact that health professionals give their best services, medical errors still exist in hospitals and it they have cost lives and led to disabilities. Taking a prevention of medical errors course, therefore becomes crucial among doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and laboratory technicians.

Some medical mistakes emanate from healthcare professionals and patients too. These faults affect patients in different ways. For instance a patient may develop a long lasting complication, family members can lose a loved one who may have been their main sole provider leading to stress and depression among affected members. Healthcare workers like doctors or nurses may contract a deadly disease such as HIV and AIDs if they make an error when carrying out a medical procedure.

Many healthcare providers have landed into legal cases following mistakes that could be prevented. The mistakes could occur in medical laboratories, surgery theatres, chemists, nursing homes, doctor assessments rooms, clinics, or in records rooms. In addition, such faults can results from the patients themselves. Most of the faults involve medicines, surgeries, diagnosis, poor communication, equipment, records, and laboratory results.

Surgeries can also go wrong. An error could lead to bleeding to death, damage to a major nerve, or even result to infections if asepsis is ignored. Wrong diagnosis could lead to an error. Some conditions often manifest in similar signs and symptoms where a doctor misses the correct diagnosis and treats a wrong disease.

The disease can progress to fatal levels especially if wrong diagnosis involves conditions of the brain, spinal cord, blood pressures, or the heart. The patient could also lead to an error. When a patient fails to mention important details such as of allergies, the doctor may prescribe a drug that may be fatal to be patient if they happen to be allergic to such medicines.

Patients may omit crucial details about effects they have on drugs. Poor communication between doctors and other health professionals such as nurses or nutritionists may lead to poor management and missed information during treatment of patients. Equipment sterilization technicians if not keen can lead to asepsis errors causing infections and complications among patients.

Poor handling of equipment during procedures has also cost transfer of infections from patients to healthcare providers. Wrong laboratory results, poor reporting and assumptions have caused missed diagnosis of very dangerous microbes in body. These are some of the few consequences of medical faults occurring in hospitals and clinics.

There is need for our health care professionals such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, laboratory technicians, and infection control professionals to take this course to boost their knowledge and gain new skills in dealing with these errors. The training entails understanding different types of medical errors, factors that increase risks of these faults, strategies of preventing them. This way, there can be a decrease in most preventable mistakes in health facilities. It also eliminates possible lawsuits, which may arise when such faults are committed.




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